


Revenge is a Kiss, This Time I Won't Miss

by reconditarmonia



Category: Bad Blood - Taylor Swift (Music Video)
Genre: F/F, Fancy dinners, Jealousy, Only One Allowed To Defeat You, Rival Sex, Semi-Public Sex, friends to enemies to enemies with benefits
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-15
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-08-13 11:07:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20173228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reconditarmonia/pseuds/reconditarmonia
Summary: Sometimes there are fancy dinners.





	Revenge is a Kiss, This Time I Won't Miss

**Author's Note:**

  * For [weakinteraction](https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/gifts).

> Thanks Poetry for beta!

It turned out that Headmistress hadn't been joking or being ironic when she introduced herself. When Catastrophe came back to the Academy for the first time, like a baby bird coming home to its nest — Arsyn, like a coward, had sicced two of her masked cronies on her and escaped in the smoke before Catastrophe could fight them off and give chase — she realized she didn't actually know where to go once she'd stowed her gear and showered, got dressed in a soft shirt and shorts of hers that had arrived, pressed and plastic-wrapped like new, while she was in training. She couldn't exactly go back to her infirmary cot; the Trinity had better things to do than babysit a patient they'd checked out.

Knockout took pity on her — "C'mon" — and led her through a door she hadn't used before, down a short hallway to an elevator. They were only in there for a few seconds, but Catastrophe could tell they'd gone up a long way. There were no buttons on the wall.

When the door slid open, she expected more cool white fluorescent light, more dark tile, more concrete. Instead, they stepped out onto plush dark green carpet. The wallpaper was patterned, and there was an actual crystal chandelier overhead. When she followed Knockout through an open door, wood rather than metal, a dozen or so heads looked up from small tables decorated with tablecloths and teacups, and it took Catastrophe a few seconds to place them: Destructa X, Homeslice, Domino, all the women she'd seen training in the tunnels or cheering and screaming as she and Knockout boxed. It was like something out of _Mona Lisa Smile_, except the last time she'd seen any of them, they'd been sweating and dressed in black leather and spandex, not in anything she'd describe as _pretty_ or _cute_. She couldn't really make the name "Homeslice" stick in her mind to the young woman in the lace dress, or "Destructa X" to the one sipping tea. (Destructa's hair looked really nice like this.) Maybe she'd find out everyone's real names. Maybe if she did she wouldn't feel so suddenly out of place, again, one new world abruptly exchanged for another. Knockout was already sliding into a chair and picking up the teapot, her strong hands and wrists holding the china delicately, as much at home as anyone there.

There was an empty chair between two women she recognized from Crimson Curse's training, and when she got closer, she saw there was a place card: _Catastrophe_. Well, that answered that question.

She's used to it now, the rituals of tea in the afternoon and cocoa in their rooms at night, even if it didn't come as easily to her as to some of the other women in the Academy (like Mother Chucker, who, she let slip to Catastrophe, had actually attended Cheltenham Ladies' College, or Cut Throat, who wasn't exactly following the traditional life path of a Smith girl). Still, the announcement of the annual banquet came as a surprise to her, and the dull assent with which the others received it was itself shocking — how could there be another finishing school for lady criminals? How could the two of them hire out a fancy hotel every year to mingle and toast each other?

"Where else could Arsyn have trained to hold her own against an Academy girl?" asked Luna, and Catastrophe couldn't really argue with that.

* * *

The hotel lobby's filled with women in cocktail dresses and expensive-looking jewelry, and a banner announces the Sister Academies Annual Banquet. Inside the double doors there's a coat check, staffed by a few girls who look like hotel employees, but also a weapons check, where two large, smiling, and utterly unpersuadable women collect the sort of thing you'd think (a dagger in a lipstick tube, Slay-Z grumpily handing over her shuriken compact) but also some things that are more unexpected (even in that long dress, where was she keeping a bazooka?; sorry, ladies, a katana is not an accessory). 

And that's where Catastrophe unexpectedly comes face to face with Arsyn again. She's known, in an abstract sense, that Arsyn and her crew would have to be here ever since Luna brought it up, but she's imagined that it'd be some kind of glimpse across the banquet hall, maybe even after they were already sitting down, not turning instinctively at a voice that was once as familiar as her own and seeing Arsyn show up right behind her in the entryway, with a gaggle of friends as though she's at the mall or the bar. Arsyn gives her a smile that looks more like a sneer, pulling a small pistol from her clutch. Suddenly she points it in Catastrophe's face, and laughs when Catastrophe jerks back. The weapons check lady clears her throat threateningly, and Arsyn hands her the pistol, fishing the ammunition out from between her breasts and surrendering that too.

Catastrophe feels light-headed; she swears she can feel an itch in her enhanced elbow, like something in her body wants to fire and slam into Arsyn's stomach at Mach 1. It must show on her face, because Knockout takes her by the arm and sweeps her away.

She's not the only one with a nemesis here. Lucky is pointedly avoiding someone; Cut Throat glares daggers across the room. Mother Chucker is flirting at a table, leaning over to show her cleavage and touching the other woman's hair, but Knockout tells her that Mother Chucker has fought that woman half a dozen times in half a dozen countries and ended up in the infirmary for two weeks after the last time.

In the corner of the room, a pianist is playing; Catastrophe’s heightened senses let her hear him through the noise of conversation, although since the things the Academy implanted in her didn’t include knowledge of classical music, she doesn’t recognize the piece. Waitstaff circulate with canapés, and she picks up a delicious-looking pastry thing, maybe a spinach puff. Before she can bite into it, Knockout grabs her wrist, forcing it back down and taking the pastry away to place on a nearby table.

"I have a compact, I can always deal with it if something gets in my teeth," Catastrophe pouts. There's no need to worry about her making the Academy look dumb.

"Don't bite anything here that you can't see the inside of," Knockout replies.

"But I thought—" What's the weapon check for, if the expectation isn't a clenched-teeth but bloodshed-free party?

"Anyone who gets got by a booby-trapped appetizer has it coming."

Catastrophe scans the room and catches Arsyn's eye. Arsyn blows her a kiss.

Once they're seated, Catastrophe has a chance to scope out the attendees without obviously staring too much. Anyone wandering in by mistake from the lobby could never think this was anything but a banquet for pupils and alumnae of, well, the normal kind of elite private schools. She's never kept up that much with international news but she could swear that there's a handful of First Ladies and princesses here.

Weirdly, interacting with the women from the other school turns out to be fun. For all Catastrophe knows, her right-hand neighbor is one of Arsyn's masked goons, but she's also a fellow cat lover who has cat collars literally studded with stolen diamonds and a passport full of stamps from places Catastrophe would love to visit someday. She in turn is massively jealous of some of Catastrophe's adventures (not to mention her perfect winged eyeliner), so they swap travel tips and stories — "of course, this was for work, so I didn't have to deal with all the crowds in the museum, oh my God, can you imagine" — and if the three of them, Catastrophe, Knockout, and their new friend, weren't all carefully dancing around the topic of any heists that might have been foiled by a rival academy, then the thought of Arsyn might not cross Catastrophe's mind all evening. (Maybe, she thinks, that exact thing is part of Arsyn's plan.)

Catastrophe's talking about running from police in the catacombs of Paris — stun pistols, rollerblades — as they finish their main course, when her new friend discreetly taps her teeth. Damn it, she did get something stuck. She pokes at it with her tongue. "Gone?" No. She tries rubbing at it with her napkin, careful of her lipstick. Still no. Despite what she told Knockout earlier, her only compact is a shuriken one like Slay-Z's and she doubts the ladies at the weapons check will give it back, so she excuses herself, promising to be back before dessert comes out so she doesn't leave them hanging for too long.

Even the bathroom of the hotel is stupidly fancy, with taps shaped like swans and marble everywhere. Catastrophe bends close to the mirror, and she's just finished fishing the thing out of her teeth when she hears the door open behind her. 

It shouldn't surprise her that it's Arsyn.

Arsyn leaves one sink between them as she leans in to touch up her lip gloss. "I saw you got a new best friend." She doesn't even bother to say hello. 

"Well, the position was available," says Catastrophe, stung, realizing that her dinner neighbor must be Arsyn's crony after all. It's not fair of Arsyn to mock her for being trusting (she knew it well enough to take advantage) and lonely (her fault!). Anyway, her best friend is Knockout. Arsyn's met her, sort of. "And I think it's really pathetic that you can't even enjoy a party without trying to take me out somehow."

"What the shit, Catastrophe?" Arsyn whirls round on her. There's a smudge of gloss off the corner of her mouth. "Do you think I'm stupid? You and your little friends have been on my ass all evening waiting for me to let my guard down." 

A movement catches Catastrophe's eye, but it's just one of the girls from the coat check coming out of a stall behind Arsyn, not someone from either of their academies who might have overheard two nemeses of the international crime world having a catfight in a bathroom. Headmistress would be mortified, and she's probably got an opposite number who would feel the same way on Arsyn's behalf.

Blame the distraction, but the only response she can think of is just a bewildered _Nooo…_, so it's either a good thing or a bad thing that what she hears come out of her mouth instead is a low "If I was trying to kill you here, you wouldn't even see it coming." It probably doesn't count as a catfight if they actually do kill each other.

Catastrophe notices that the girl is holding a wooden coat hanger, which seems like a weird thing to bring into the bathroom. Then she's moving before she can even think, as though her eyes are communicating straight to the rest of her body, telling her legs to close the distance between herself and Arsyn, her shoulder to shove Arsyn hard out of the way, and her right fist to swing for the girl's head, and only doubling back afterwards to tell her brain _oh crap she just folded that into a garrote_.

Neither she nor Arsyn are armed, but Catastrophe's still got weapons she can't check. The girl dodges her right fist, then her left, and pulls out a gun, but she's still pointing it at Arsyn, so Catastrophe seizes her wrist in a grip that's far stronger than human and twists to point it downwards, just before it fires. Arsyn high-kicks the gun out of the girl's hand, her stiletto heel raking Catastrophe's arm, none of the coordination that they used to share. The girl yanks her arm back, trying to pull Catastrophe off balance, but Catastrophe rolls with it, somersaulting forward and throwing the girl into the wall.

It's all over in a few seconds. The coat check girl scrambles up and makes a run for it.

Arsyn looks at her; both of them are breathing hard. "That wasn't you."

And if everything else wasn't Arsyn, then it's something else that's kept Arsyn on her mind all evening. Catastrophe's heart is pounding. "If I was trying to kill you here, I wouldn't send someone else."

Arsyn starts to push the couch (the bathroom has a _velvet couch_) against the door, and for a dizzying second or two, Catastrophe doesn't know if it's to make extra sure that her friends won't come in to help her kill Arsyn, or to make sure that Arsyn's friends won't help her kill Catastrophe.

Neither one of those guesses turns out to be right. Arsyn shoves her up against the wall and kisses her hard and wet, and some things fall into place, like how she's been missing something that she needs to feel whole (other than, like, her original vertebrae), or why Knockout doesn't feel like a replacement best friend in the same way.

Actually, she doesn't want to think about Knockout right now.

Catastrophe presses her palm against Arsyn's breast and feels Arsyn's heart racing as fast as her own; squeezes, and hears Arsyn's breath stutter. It's more power over Arsyn than she's thought she had since the night Arsyn threw her out a window, and feeling and hearing Arsyn respond does things to her body that she wasn't sure it could still do; she feels like a live wire, everything connected. Arsyn runs her tongue up Catastrophe's throat and Catastrophe can feel it down to her toes.

The pressure of Arsyn's hands on Catastrophe's shoulders slackens almost imperceptibly, and just like in the fight before, Catastrophe moves before she can think, grabbing both of Arsyn's wrists and pinning _her_ to the wall. Or that's what she's trying to do, before Arsyn knees her sharply in the side and takes advantage of the moment to push off the wall and throw Catastrophe back, gasping, over a sink, cracking the mirror. The impact jars her whole body, her teeth; the pain exploding in her back is almost like déjà vu. But now she doesn’t have to let the pain slow her down anymore. Catastrophe can feel herself shaking as she wraps her legs round Arsyn's neck. As she vaults off the sink to drag her to the floor, she realizes the shaking is laughter.

Arsyn grins at her, crawling over to push Catastrophe's skirt up her thighs. "See, aren't we better this way?"

Fingering each other as they sit on the floor with their backs against the couch isn't the most comfortable use of the furniture, but it's an acceptable truce when neither of them is likely to let the other hold her down for long. Arsyn likes it fast, with Catastrophe's thumb on her clit; her chest is flushed red, her eyes closed, her dress strap hanging down. Catastrophe could watch Arsyn at her mercy like this forever, if she weren't coming apart under Arsyn's touch herself, grabbing Arsyn's hand and moving it herself when she needs to. A thousand signals are flooding her senses: the heat and the sweat of her skin, how wet Arsyn is, the pressure and slide of Arsyn’s fingers, the taste of the air and of Arsyn’s gloss on her lips. When she comes, the sensation is so overwhelming that she wonders for a moment if there's a circuit in her body that she's burning through.

She pulls her hand out of Arsyn's underwear and stands up, pushing the couch back into its place. Arsyn's eyes slide open slowly, and before the tight look of hopelessly close desperation on her face can shift into one of thwarted frustration, Catastrophe's walked out the door, back towards the banquet. She can hear Arsyn scream as the door clicks shut.

Maybe she'll leave Arsyn there, hot and abandoned.

Maybe she won't.

Maybe she'll pull the fire alarm instead.


End file.
